Ìlọrin: The Yoruba Town That Became an Emirate

Ìlọrin is a Yoruba-speaking city of over a million people, governed by an emirate whose ruling house is Fulani, sitting inside a Nigerian state assigned to the North-Central geopolitical zone. Every part of that sentence is disputed by somebody, and the dispute is not academic: it determines political representation, land claims and access to office. This file sets out what the sources establish, marks clearly where they conflict, and presents the positions people hold rather than adjudicating among them.

Two warnings before the substance. First, much of the standard narrative descends from Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas, completed in the 1890s and published in 1921, which is a partisan Ọ̀yọ́-Christian source about events in which Ọ̀yọ́ was a losing party, and its handling of Ìlọrin should be read as such. There is a standing scholarly literature questioning how traditional Johnson's traditional history is 1. Second, the dates in the accessible sources conflict with one another at several critical points, and where they do this file says so instead of choosing.

Before Àfọ̀njá

Ìlọrin was established by Yoruba people in the late eighteenth century as a military settlement within the Ọ̀yọ́ empire 2. The tradition names four Yoruba baálẹ̀ in succession: Laderin, who founded the city; his son Pasin, driven into exile and killed by Bàṣọ̀run Gáà because of his rising influence; Pasin's son Alugbin; and on Alugbin's death, Àfọ̀njá 3.

That is the Yoruba foundation and it is not seriously disputed by anyone. Ìlọrin was a Yoruba town before it was an emirate, and Àfọ̀njá's family had held it for four generations.

Àfọ̀njá

Àfọ̀njá held the rank of Aàrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò, the supreme military commander of the Ọ̀yọ́ empire, which he acquired after the death of Oyabi and which the sources describe him as taking forcefully 3. He used Ìlọrin as his military outpost 4.

The quarrel with Aláàfin Àwólé

Aláàfin Àwólé Arógangan reigned from 1789 to 1796 5. His reign is judged catastrophic in the sources: he alienated his ministers, and he desecrated Ifẹ̀ in 1793 5.

The precipitating order was to attack Ìwéré-Ilé, the fortified maternal home of the late Aláàfin Abíọ́dún, which Àwólé is understood to have issued hoping the Kakanfò would fail there and lose his standing 5. Àfọ̀njá refused, bound by an oath and unwilling to incur an earlier Aláàfin's curse that any Aàrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò who assaulted Ìwéré-Ilé would die miserably 4.

Recognising the trap, Àfọ̀njá allied with Bàṣọ̀run Asamu Agba-o-lekan and the Ọwọ́ta of Ọ̀yọ́, besieged Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé, and sent the Aláàfin an empty covered calabash, the formal signal of rejection requiring ritual suicide 3. Àwólé took his own life in 1796, with some sources giving 1797 5.

Note what this means constitutionally. The mechanism Àfọ̀njá used was the legitimate one, described in the file on Ọ̀yọ́: the calabash was the Ọ̀yọ́ constitution working as designed. What was irregular was that a Kakanfò, not the Bàṣọ̀run alone, drove it, and that he did so with an army outside the walls.

Àwólé's curse

The tradition holds that from the palace forecourt Àwólé shot three arrows, north, south and west, and pronounced a curse. As recorded by Samuel Johnson and very widely reproduced since, the words are:

My curse be on you for your disloyalty and disobedience, so let your children disobey you. If you send them on an errand, let them never return to bring you word again. To all the points I shot my arrows will you be carried as slaves. My curse will carry you to the sea and beyond the seas, slaves will rule over you, and you their masters will become slaves. 6

Three qualifications on this text. It is presented here in the English of Johnson's published version, not in a Yoruba original, because no transcribed Yoruba text of the curse could be verified in an accessible source; a three-layer treatment is therefore not possible and should not be faked. The page attribution commonly given, page 192 of the 1921 edition, comes from opinion columns reproducing the passage rather than from the primary text, which could not be opened for verification 6. And the curse is a literary and interpretive tradition about the Yoruba nineteenth century, invoked constantly in modern Yoruba political commentary as an explanation for disunity, so its circulation tells you about Yoruba self-understanding whether or not Àwólé said it.

The Jàmá'a and Alimi

Around 1817 Àfọ̀njá offered freedom and protection to Muslims and to enslaved people facing persecution. Those who came constituted the Jàmá'a, mainly Hausa, Nupe, Bariba, Aja and Fulani, bearing distinctive marks called Kende 3.

This is the decisive act and it is worth stating in its own terms rather than through hindsight. Àfọ̀njá, in revolt against Ọ̀yọ́, needed a force that owed him and not the Aláàfin. Manumitting Muslim slaves and offering sanctuary produced exactly that: a body of fighting men with no Ọ̀yọ́ loyalty and every reason for loyalty to him. It also produced a body of men with a religious and social identity of their own, and a leadership independent of him.

Alimi, in full Sàlih, a Fulani Muslim cleric, was invited to Ìlọrin by Àfọ̀njá and brought Hausa slaves who were recruited into the army; the sources record him inciting a revolt of the Hausa slaves on whom the care of the horses and therefore the strength of the cavalry depended 37.

The chronology is disputed by a named scholar. Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi held that Alimi never arrived at Ìlọrin until the 1820s 3, which if correct removes him from the events of 1817 and changes who is responsible for what. The Ìlọrin reference dates the rebellion to 1817 with support from Alimi 2; the emirate reference dates the Àfọ̀njá-Alimi alliance against Ọ̀yọ́ to around 1810 8. Three sources, three dates. This is not resolvable from the accessible material.

Àfọ̀njá's death

Àfọ̀njá lost control of the Jàmá'a and tried to disband it. The accessible sources disagree on when he died.

One gives circa 1813, with Àfọ̀njá burnt to ashes by the Jàmá'a under Alimi's leadership after attempting to disband them, calling on his former ally Solagberu, and receiving no help 3. Another gives a Jàmá'a revolt in early 1824, with a mob besieging his compound and killing him with arrows and spears 4.

The circa 1813 date is internally inconsistent with the same source's 1817 date for the formation of the Jàmá'a, which cannot post-date the man it killed. Most accounts place the death in 1823 or 1824, and that is the range to report, noting the 1813 figure as an outlier.

The emirate

After the deaths of Àfọ̀njá and Alimi, Alimi's son Abd al-Salam, Abdulsalami, emerged as ruler and pledged allegiance to the Sokoto Caliphate in 1823 2. The start of his reign is given variously as 1820, 1823 and 1824, ending 1842 89; the pledge to Sokoto in 1823 is the more consistently reported anchor.

The transformation was thorough. Islam became the state religion and the Emir and his cabinet were bound to sharia 10. Ìlọrin was a major centre of the slave trade, with accounts describing the largest slave market in that part of Africa 8.

Militarily the emirate pushed south and was stopped. Its southward expansion ended by 1838 with defeats at Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́ and Òṣogbo, where Ìbàdàn's superior access to European firearms proved decisive 8. Òṣogbo in 1838 is the battle that fixed the boundary between the caliphate and the Yoruba forest states, and it is why the jihad stopped where it did.

The line of Emirs

The sequence documented in accessible sources is incomplete and should be presented as such:

	Emir	Reign
1	Abdulsalami bin Shehu Alimi	1820/1823/1824–1842
2	Muhammad Shitta bin Shehu Alimi	1842–1860
3	Zubair bin Abdulsalami	1860–1868
4	Aliyu bin Muhammad Shitta	1868–1891
5	Abdulsalami Mamaloso bin Zubair	1891–1895
6	Sulaiman bin Aliyu	1895–1915
…	(emirs 7 to 10 not enumerated in the accessible sources)
11	Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari	from 28 August 1995

The structure, and the Àfọ̀njá seat in it

Succession involves four Baloguns, district chiefs representing the Hausa, Yoruba and Fulani quarters, together with representatives of the Àfọ̀njá family 8.

This detail deserves more weight than it usually gets. The emirate's own succession machinery includes a place for the descendants of the man the emirate displaced, and it includes district chiefs representing a Yoruba quarter. Whatever the emirate is, it is not a structure that erased the Yoruba town beneath it, and the internal arrangement is a negotiated one from the start.

The 1897 defeat

Sir George Taubman Goldie ordered punitive expeditions against Bida, Nupe and Ìlọrin in 1897. Within five weeks two emirates were subjugated by little more than five hundred Hausa constabulary, assisted by modern machine guns and light artillery 12.

At Ìlọrin the Royal Niger Company occupied the city with heavy casualties. In the great market square, before the Emir's burning palace, the end of slavery and of the Emir's rule was proclaimed, and the surrender of two thousand soldiers was taken. Two days later Emir Sulaiman, who had fled with eight thousand men, returned and surrendered 12. Ìlọrin was incorporated into the Northern Nigeria Protectorate by 1900 2.

The treaties Goldie made with Bida, Nupe and Ìlọrin have been characterised as theatre intended to demonstrate effective occupation to other European powers, since no effective control existed even after the expeditions 13. That reading is worth keeping, because it explains why the paper record of the conquest looks more decisive than the situation on the ground was.

The consequence for Ìlọrin's identity is administrative and it is the root of the modern dispute. Britain assigned Ìlọrin to Northern Nigeria, governed through the emirate under indirect rule, rather than to the Yoruba-speaking south. Every subsequent argument about where Ìlọrin belongs runs through that decision.

The identity question today

There are four positions in circulation and they are not variants of one another. Each is set out here in the terms its holders use.

Position one: Ìlọrin is Yoruba. Modern Ìlọrin is mainly inhabited by Yoruba people, Yoruba is the lingua franca of the city, and Yoruba is the primary ethnic group of Kwara State; the language of the city was Yoruba, as was the emerging culture, and the city maintains its Yoruba cultural identity despite its North-Central classification 214.

Position two: Ìlọrin is a Fulani emirate. The traditional ruler is of Fulani heritage, successive emirs have been Fulani descendants of Alimi ruling a Yoruba-majority city, and the emirate belongs to the Sokoto Caliphate 28.

Position three: Ìlọrin is a distinct synthesis and neither of the above. Scholarship holds that Ìlọrin was far from a typical Fulani emirate and is better understood as a Yoruba Islamic emirate, with a culture rooted in ethnic amalgamation, a multiethnic town of Hausa, Yoruba, Malian, Gobir, Nupe and Fulani settlers 10. Ìlọrin is the southernmost point of Fulani expansion and carries characteristics of both north and south; a named essay argues the identity is neither Yoruba, Nupe nor Fulani 15.

Position four: the suppression thesis. The history has produced a narrative of non-Yoruba identity coupled with a deliberate suppression of Yoruba tribal identity, with Islam promoted in its place as the rallying point for the people 16.

The four are not equally weighted in the same places. Position two is institutional, in that it describes the constitutional arrangement that exists. Position one is demographic and linguistic, in that it describes who lives there and what they speak. Position three is the position most current in scholarship. Position four is a political claim about how the other three came to be arranged as they are.

The organisations

The dispute has institutional form. The Ilorin Emirate Descendants Progressive Union, IEDPU, is described as the mother of associations in Ìlọrin Emirate, with branches across the five local government areas of Asa, Ilorin East, Ilorin South, Ilorin West and Moro, and it has been studied academically as a hometown and development association 17. The Àfọ̀njá Descendants Union, ADU, was formed in 1978 to advance the cause of the Yoruba in the town 16.

A separately named Ilorin Descendants Progressive Union, said to protect indigenes of Fulani extraction, appears in one source, and the relationship between it and the IEDPU is unclear 16. Do not assume they are the same body.

Language

Ìlọrin people speak Yoruba as a first language but in a distinct dialect whose features track the town's geo-ethnic composition 16. A socio-onomastic study documents distinctive Ọ̀-ní prefix surname markers among Ìlọrin Yoruba 18. Ìlọrin Yoruba carries a heavy Arabic and Hausa lexical layer through Islamic scholarship and long settlement, which is exactly what one would expect and which is itself part of the evidence.

Kwara State and current status

Kwara State was created on 27 May 1967 from the former Ìlọrin and Kabba provinces of the Northern Region, initially named West Central State and then renamed Kwara, a Hausa name for the River Niger 19. Ìlọrin is its capital, and the state is classified in the North-Central geopolitical zone. Its four main ethnic groups are Yoruba, Fulani, Nupe and Bariba, with Yoruba, Nupe, Bokobaru and Fulfulde as the main languages 19.

Ìlọrin's population was 777,667 at the 2006 census, making it Nigeria's seventh-largest city, with estimates around 1.17 million in 2022 2. It hosts the University of Ìlọrin and is a substantial administrative and commercial centre.

The town has a long-standing reputation in Islamic scholarship. Ìlọrin was one of the principal centres of Arabic learning in the region from the nineteenth century, and its ulama produced a body of Arabic-language writing that is a significant and under-used archive for the period.

Further reading

The scholarship worth going to beyond the web sources cited here includes H. O. Danmole's work on Ìlọrin (1997), Safi Jimba's Iwe Itan Ilorin, and studies of the role of non-Yoruba groups in the transformation of Ìlọrin in the 1790s to 1820s 20. On Johnson as a source, see the standing methodological critique in History in Africa 1.